This disclosure relates generally to providing digital content to users of an online system, and more specifically to providing automatic video preview of video content within a digital magazine.
Digital distribution channels disseminate a wide variety of digital content including videos, text, images, audio, links, and interactive media (e.g., games, collaborative content) to users. A user of a digital magazine application can view videos and play videos on content pages of a digital magazine. Conventionally, before a video being played back by a user, the video is presented to the user for preview in one or more static images, e.g., video frames selected from the video or reduced-size version of the video frames (also commonly referred to as “thumbnails” or “thumbnail images”). However, videos often contain dynamic and interesting content, e.g., an exciting football game having a lot of exciting movements of players. Presenting video content in static thumbnail images to users on content pages of a digital magazine may render the video content less representative, less accurate and less attractive. Furthermore, statically presenting video content by static thumbnail images, e.g., a video advertising a new car, is not effective for content providers, e.g., car manufacturers and advertising agency, to effectively advertise their products or services because the static thumbnail images of the video do not vividly represent the interesting and dynamics of the video content.